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Monday, July 07, 2008

rhizome-incorrect

One of the favored analogies of the people on the Rhizome chatboards attacking current art on blogs and WIKIS is "using animated GIFs and default blog templates is like using acrylic paint and prestretched canvases!"I use acrylic paint, prestretched canvases, and default blog templates. Whoah... short circuit.... against protocol...... getting weaker......

16 comments:

Does that mean such a person is a hobbyist, a "Sunday painter/blogger," and not in possession of sufficient expertise to be taken seriously?I can't comment on the blog thing, but how would such a criticism square with the absolutely open possibilities as to materials in other arts, as well as the integration of found objects in painting? Every material carries with it histories and implications. That's why Pollock and Stella tried to avoid the beaux-arts vibe of oil paint and favored enamel. Now if you use prestretched canvas and acrylic paint, that doesn't necessarily mean you are integrating the readymade into your art and commenting upon hobbyist art supplies, but it just doesn't seem at all valid any more to dismiss an artist BECAUSE of his/her materials.

Eric- sorry, sounds like you got it backwards- Tom is being critical of the Rhizome crowd. Actually, if you look at Tom's work he uses defaults and presets- older drawing software, various freewares, printing on consumer paper- he falls more into the "pre-stretched canvas and tubes of acrylic" side of the technology world than those arguing that if you're going to use technology in art you need to know how to program.

I would love to incorporate original music with digital images/animations like Tom does. The whole obsession with the techy side of things is for people who get into technology but don't have much talent or ability to get things done. It reminds of people I have known through the years who buy all this expensive music equipment and then it sits and rots because it was about commodity fetishism and not making stuff.

Thanks for the comments (since I no longer have comments--long story).

When I first encountered people who said you had to know how to write code to use the computer as an art tool, I always used "grinding pigments and sizing canvases" as an example of the extreme control some painters insisted on but that was by no means a universal requirement.

Some of the Rhizome commenters get it, but others keep using "straight from the tube" paint and premade canvas as an example of something a painter would of course never want to do.

This made me realize that a lot of the people I was arguing with are folks with engineering and tech backgrounds who don't really know what's been going on in painting in the last 40 years or so. Therefore they don't get what is happening now with animated GIFs and other "default" forms. They talk like they do because it's a tech form and they think they understand all tech forms (and are quite smug about it, some of them).

"Good enough to get the job done" is a pretty good rule of thumb, whatever the medium.